Sabado, Pebrero 18, 2017

MAKATI
CITY – “Bilib ako sa mga style mo sa
piyesa, wala ng kopya-kopya (I lauded you on your series of singing. You did
not use a copy in playing your piece),” I told Jun Lahi, a folk rock singer near the seedy Makati Avenue here, after he finished the third of his fourth one
hour each gig for Cuervolito, a 15
tables’ bar.’

CROONER. Folk
rock singer Jun Lahi, 49, who could sing hundreds of country and rock songs

without
any guide of a lyric and guitar chord's book. The crooner belts scintillating
songs from

Neil Young, Eagles, America, and others at Cuervolito and Café Cubana
at Makati Avenue in

Makati City. Photo by Mortz C. Ortigoza

When I and
my 21 years old long haired son Niko entered, the bar teemed with European,
Japanese and South Korean tourists and their Filipino girl and gay friends they probably picked up from the thoroughfares in Poblacion Makati here,
Lahi, who wore the vaunted John Lennon’s style eye glasses, was belting with his electric
guitar America’s “I Need You” (click red words to hear the version), followed by Dan Fogelberg’s Leader of the Band, and
Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush complemented
with a harmonica wielded on the rack attached to his neck just like the Canadian folk singer
Young.

“Look pa, he sings what you sang when I and
Jigger (his older brother) were in elementary grades,” my son, a
graphic designer of one of the major newspapers in the country, quipped as he
gulped the remaining content of his brown bottled San Miguel’s Pale Pilsen
while I fished out with my right hand fingers the complimentary fried peanuts
given by the waitress.